Taylor Swift lands on Planet 46
Today is the big day.
Taylor Swift is in town.
It’s important, because she’s my future daughter-in-law (so promises my 5-year-old son). He honestly believes that Ms. Swift is his girlfriend.
That sounds silly, until I realize that I never even spoke to my first girlfriend in fourth grade. We never had a chance.
I bring all this up today because it’s a fine day to check out the Planet 46 feature on Taylor Swift today. See George Lang’s take on the rising stardom of Taylor. He makes it clear why my 5-year-old (and hundreds of thousands of other young people) feel like they have a personal relationship with her:
Swift might not ever need to write her autobiography — in essence, she’s been doing it since she wrote her first song, titled “Lucky You,” when she was 10. When she got bullied by mean girls in junior high, she went home and put pen to paper, then lyrics to music.
Anyway, we’re not going to the concert. But we’ll see her at the wedding.
I might have to finally get an iPhone (or something similar)
I love iPhones.
I know how to use an iPhone. We own an iPhone in my family.
But I’ve always defended the trusty Blackberry.
- It never breaks. It’s made of concrete and steel. On the other hand, if you look at an iPhone funny, the screen cracks.
- The keyboard is very easy to use.
- It takes good photos.
- I can take video and browse Web sites (and get the latest NBA scores).
But lately, I’ve found myself finding wanting to do more things on my mobile device than my Blackberry is capable of.
- I’ve wanted to see NewsOK’s full Web site, rather than the customized mobile site.
- I’ve wanted to share YouTube videos.
- I’ve wanted to download cool applications.
The last straw came on Saturday, and I and another under-5 soccer coach were trying to verify our field assignments while standing between four soccer field at the large complex in Edmond. I didn’t trust that my Blackberry Curve would serve my needs to browse the soccer club’s Web site to see the field assignments.
I actually said this aloud to a group of parents.
“Who has an iPhone?”
With that statement, I give up. I can no longer get by with my Blackberry Curve. I must do better. I can no longer put up the good fight and must get in line with the masses. I need a more powerful Web-enabled phone that I can trust to get me to all Web sites.
I’ve since realized (while writing this) that I could indeed use my Blackberry to browse the Edmond Soccer Club site. The formatting is a little off, but I can still get around on it.
But here’s the bottom line: I didn’t trust it. Once the trust is gone, the whole relationship will crumble. I trust the Blackberry will show me good mobile versions of Web sites, but I don’t trust that I’ll successfully see more complex versions. I don’t trust that small sites that target a niche community (like Edmond Soccer Club) will deliver a simplified mobile version for my Blackberry.
All that said, however, doesn’t mean I’ll join the iPhone culture. I think they’re great, but the entire world can’t own an iPhone. Someone has to be a little different.
The Droid … now that would be different.
‘Book of Hope’ nDepth piece put things in proper perspective
This morning, I was frustrated with my Kindergarten-age son.
He showed me a large poster sheet that was filled with questions for him to fill out.
Awesome. Looks like fun.
He’s supposed to tape photos of himself and of his family, as well as answering a series of questions about himself.
Super. Can’t wait. … uh. Wait a minute.
“When does it need to be done?” I asked while still multitasking on my daughter’s hair.
“Any day,” he responded.
OK … it must be for a project in a week or two. I’ll get more details later. Cool.
(To be honest, the deadline sounded ‘cool,’ because I imagined it being something my wife would work on with him some evening this week.)
But then minutes later he brought me another piece of paper that read something to the affect of …
“Congratulations! Tyler is the student of the week! Fill out the paper and return it on Monday ……. “
Arrgh! That’s today. And there are lots of questions there.
And – worst of all – it’s a really big deal to him
Yeah, I know. I should have looked in his backpack on Friday. But I was still frustrated. I sat him down to fill out the large sheet of paper and proceeded to look for photos. (Photos, by the way, that we don’t have. It’s a digital world. We don’t have many photos you can actually hold.)
In the end, we were 40 minutes late today. It was frustrating. What should have been a fun project was instead a stressful project.
My older son was bossy about the way my Kindergartner wrote. My younger daughter didn’t like her shoes. I couldn’t find the scissors. I cut myself on a kitchen knife (don’t ask). And where do we keep the tape, anyway?
The sheet about Tyler looked like it was put together by a 5-year-old and a parent who didn’t have much time to help.
It looked that way because that’s what it was. And, I must admit, I wasn’t a very nice father about the whole ordeal. I feel a bit bad about not being able to enjoy that “Student of the Week” project.
But it will go down as another memory of the hectic life of having three children. I could have done better. Hopefully, the third child will see the benefit of all the lessons I’ve learned.
But just when I start feeling sorry for myself, NewsOK’s storytelling can bring me back to reality. I realize I don’t really have a lot to complain about.
The featured story on NewsOK this morning was an nDepth: Stories of the Ages piece written by Bryan Painter’s about the Book of Ages at Children’s Hospital at OU Medical Center.
This video says it all.
So after work today, I’ll make sure to be an “organized evening” father to make up for “wild, running-around-looking-for-a-pair-of-scissors in the morning” father. I’ll gladly hear about everything that being a ‘student of the week’ means.
After all, it’s OK being a little late for work now and again. I’ll take that inconvenience any day compared to the struggles inside the Book of Hope.
OKC Skyline cam makes its debut on NewsOK
I know my blog doesn’t have the power of OKC Central.
And I know Steve Lackmeyer has already told his readers about the OKC Skyline cam that we launched a special coverage page this weekend.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t get back into the blogging swing with a post about what Steve has already told you about.
So … please check out the OKC Skyline cam — a live video feed of the Devon Tower construction site. The page is open to all NewsOK.com visitors, but the live video feed is only available to NewsOK registered users who are also subscribers to The Oklahoman.
That always makes the process a little tricky, because we have to link your NewsOK profile to your subscriber profile. We’ve done this for many users over the last couple of years as we’ve established our Digital Oklahoman and allowed access to those experiences to Oklahoman subscribers.
Simply put, if you are a subscriber to The Oklahoman and aren’t seeing the live video feed, then you need to visit your NewsOK Settings page and scroll down about halfway down the page along the left side until you see the section titled “Oklahoman Subscribers.”
The directions we have on that page say this:
If you subscribe to The Oklahoman please provide your account number below. This will allow you access to premium areas of NewsOK like ClubOK and The Electronic Edition. If you are unsure of your account number click here to look it up or call 1-877-98-PAPER (1-877-987-2737)
When you click to look up your account number, you should be able to enter your home address and phone number to access your subscriber profile.
We hope this works fairly easily for you. If not, customer service representatives can help. We will get it worked out for you to see the live video if you are indeed a subscriber.
Thanks for your patience. And thanks to Steve Lackmeyer and David Morris for making the live video of a growing downtown Oklahoma City available for our customers.
Branding articles on NewsOK
We launched some functionality in the last week or so that we hope draws more attention to some of our deep coverage.
On many of our articles you might notice some images above the headlines that draw attention to pages deep within our site. They look something like this:
We call then ‘article branding.’ We think these branding headers are an excellent opportunity for us to showcase the depth of coverage in certain areas.
For example, you’ll see the example above on most of our high school sports articles. You’ll see similar images for our OU, OSU and Oklahoma City Thunder articles. And we’ll also be using these types of branding images to drive our customers deep into the Web site for our ongoing coverage pages. When we have an update on the Sean Sutton case or the pharmacy shooting story, you’ll see links to our significant ongoing coverage of those stories.
Perhaps it’s just a small addition, but it’s another step in improving the navigation on our massive site, which is constantly a major objective within our offices.
